Princess Eugenie has spoken about how ‘everything has changed’ since she became a mother, in an interview at this year’s World Economic Forum.
The interview took place a couple of days before Eugenie announced she was pregnant with her second child, as part of the Reuters Impact Arctic Warning series.
Eugenie explained she thinks her son August, is ‘going be like an activist from two years old, which is in a couple of days’ and how ‘everything’ is for the next generation, in relation to tackling the climate crisis.
The Royal expressed how others working to save the oceans, such as Peter Thompson, the UN Special Envoy for oceans, had expressed similar reasons as to why they were trying to raise awareness around plastic and climate issues.
Britain’s Princess Eugenie said that she remained optimistic about the climate crisis despite ‘doom and gloom’ amid growing awareness of the issue, during an interview in Davos. See our full coverage from #wef23: https://t.co/rexkt0edjw pic.twitter.com/iRj0xo9qkg
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 23, 2023
‘Every decision we now make has to be for whether August, what he’s going to be able to look at and do and how he’s going to live his life.
‘But I think also as a mother you all of a sudden, totally you change, your hormones change, everything changes. But like now I’m scared of flying and things like that. I would never be before. It’s the same with how you view the world.’
She said how all she thinks about is ‘what happens to rising sea levels and the communities that are on the beaches, who depend solely on the sea, as well as what August can do about it in the future. You know what his education will be. At home we have no plastic and we’re trying to, as much as possible, have no plastic. I’m trying to teach him [August] that, but you know, it is a battle.’
During the interview, the Princess mentioned her hope for the future of the environment, by saying: ‘I like to be “glass half full”‘, adding how she’d ‘rather be that way’, but that sometimes ‘the facts and the figures and sometimes having the dinners do give you that sort of sense of frustration and doom and gloom.’
While she is not a working Royal and doesn’t receive any taxpayer funding, Eugenie supports a number of causes such across sectors like teenage cancer, the prevention of human trafficking, as well as the environment.
Eugenie warned of the impact of a changing environment on vulnerable individuals, noting how ‘modern slavery and human trafficking is a really big issue across the globe’.
‘There are 49 million people estimated in slavery today,’ she explained, ‘and we know that when the climate is vulnerable, the most vulnerable people are affected by it.
Britain’s Princess Eugenie said climate change and modern slavery ‘goes hand in hand,’ and warned that the impact of a changing environment will be most felt by vulnerable communities. See our full coverage from #wef23: https://t.co/rexkt0edjw pic.twitter.com/gJApyq9XVZ
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 24, 2023
‘And we’re going to see that more and more, you know, each time there’s a crisis happening, that people are going to be vulnerable and taken into difficult situations. So climate goes hand in hand with it really.’
Tackling modern slavery is one of Eugenie’s passions and interests. The Princess and Juliade Boinville launched the The Anti-Slavery Collective in 2018 at the Change Makers Summit. The initiative acts as an ‘independent collective whose mission is to bring change-makers together to raise awareness for modern slavery as a global epidemic’.
The pair are long-term friends after meeting when they were both at school.
